The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Management zones refer to contiguous regions within an agricultural field that have similar limiting factors that influence harvested yields of crops. The field regions that belong to the same management zone can usually be managed uniformly with respect to seeding, irrigation, fertilizer application, and harvesting.
One advantage of identifying management zones within an agricultural field is that information about the zones may help crop growers to customize their agricultural practices to increase the field's productivity and yield. Customization of the practices may include for example, selecting particular seed hybrids, seed populations and nitrogen applications for the individual zones.